Wherever You Are, YOU Are King or Queen

Introduction 2: Where and How

Cover page | Preface | Introduction 1 | Introduction 2 | Introduction 3 |

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Introduction 2

WHERE

Words like “country” and “nation” have a lot of baggage. We hear them and immediately think of what we’re used to: a particular geographical territory with (comparatively) stable borders and a recognized central authority. Needless to say, that is not what we are shooting for here.

That said, now is not the time to go inventing a bunch of brand-new words, so we are going with “nation” for reasons we will discuss in Part II. For the time being, suffice it to say that there are many other ways in which polities can be organized beyond the model we’re used to.

A nomadic people, for example, may consider themselves a nation, and may rightly be considered so by others. A diaspora or a network of intentional communities is geographically dispersed, but if they have sufficient coherence and connection in other ways, they may be considered a nation of sorts.

In 1860, Paul-Émile de Puydt envisioned a different model. He argued that instead of you and your property being subject to the authority and overlordship of a single government, you ought to be free to choose from a variety of competing, jurisdictionally coterminous governance providers.

This idea, which de Puydt called panarchy, is similar to today’s concept of market anarchism, in which private agencies peacefully compete in a free and open market to provide security and justice services to willing customers.

Today, new technologies and innovations allow geographically distributed people to communicate, collaborate, and cohere in ways unavailable to our ancestors. This opens the door to new forms of human social organization.

The distributed nation will combine all of these elements into a new kind of polity.

In the distributed nation concept, property is paramount. The most important property of all, of course, is self-ownership: the dispositive decision-making authority that each and every human person has over his or her own body, life, and being. And one’s physical property—one’s land, home, and possessions—are an extension of this self-ownership.

The concept of the distributed nation holds your claim to these two forms of property to be sacred and inviolate. The distributed nation does not seek to subsume, claim, or control you or your land. Your property is yours, every bit as much as your life is yours. Thus, your title to your home and land ought to be allodial—that is, entirely yours, with no superior landlord. 

Needless to say, that poses a problem, since nearly every government on Earth claims the “right” to be that superior landlord: to tax you for the use of your own property, to control what you do on it, and even to claim it from you when they wish. Dealing with this problem will be one of our principle tasks in the years ahead.

In the meantime, according to natural law, your property IS yours allodially. Our task is to make that moral fact into an actual fact.

The distributed nation begins with you, on your own land or in your own home. That home, that land, is your kingdom. The distributed nation is a network of sovereign beings living in their own sovereign kingdoms.

If you do not own a home, it still begins with you, wherever you are…anywhere in the world. Even if you own nothing at all, you are still a sovereign being. You belong to you and no one else. That makes you king or queen in the space you occupy. And that is what this is all about.

HOW

Aye, there’s the rub. How to do something that has never been done before? How to do something this big?

What’s the old joke? Very carefully.

This is a large undertaking. There is no quick fix. 

Throughout this work, we will be exploring the question of how, and I will be laying out a plan. For now, we can simply consider the question in broad strokes…

• We must have a set of unifying ideals. This means we need a statement of principles.

• We must declare those principles, and our intentions, to ourselves, to each other, and to the world.
  (Here, we must note that “to ourselves” is not some throwaway line. This is not collectivism. The distributed nation is not here to subsume you into a blob. You are a unique, sacred, irreplaceable being. This all begins with you.)

• We need ways to connect, communicate, and collaborate.

• We need a clear plan for putting our principles into practice.

• We need to focus on exiting old or oppressive institutions and building new ones.

• We need to find every way possible to expand our freedom, and we must prepare for the day when success or circumstances thrust that freedom upon us.

• Eventually, we will need methods for negotiating with existing conventional governments, and for interacting and harmonizing with the many other experiments in freedom that are going to arise.

We will need to think big. Bigger than we’ve ever thought before. Now is not the time for half measures.

It is also essential here to briefly touch on a few things we will not be doing…

We will not be focusing on, or teaching how to exploit, legal ‘loopholes’ designed, for example, to get us out of paying taxes.

There may be some valid way of escaping the jurisdiction of the state, and we will be investigating possibilities. There may even be certain types of negotiations that can increase our degree of relative freedom and move us closer to full independence. But a focus on loopholes ultimately validates the state’s claim that they have any legitimate authority over us whatsoever. That is not what we are about.

Building a new world begins with the consciousness-shifting realization that no one has the automatic authority to rule over you, that human consent is required in all things, and that every government on planet Earth runs afoul of these principles. We cannot reach a new world if we’re still wallowing around in the muck of the old.

We also will not be strapping on muskets and starting a “revolution” to “take back” America or New Zealand or any other country in which we live.

There are numerous reasons for this, which we will explore in Part II. In short…it wouldn’t work, and we would not want it to even if it could. Taking over an entire area by force and imposing a new blueprint upon everyone in that area is not the solution. Indeed, it is a very big part of the problem. 

We cannot just fling ourselves in mad opposition to the powers that be. Not that they don’t deserve it—they very much do. But that path leads nowhere but pointless martyrdom. And that is not what we are after.

I know that all of this raises more questions than it answers. The purpose of this book will be to answer those questions, steadily and systematically, as we move forward.

Let’s do it.

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Update: What’s in a Word?
(This is one of those edits/additions/clarifications I promised in the Preface.)

A few readers expressed concerns about two terms I used in this piece: sacred and king/queen. I should clarify my use of both.

Sacred

If you look up this word in a dictionary and thesaurus, you do get definitions and synonyms that are entirely religious in meaning. But you also get words like inviolable, untouchable, inalienable, protected, etc. This is the sense in which I mean it. The word “sacrosanct” is also included among them, and while that does have a religious vibe, it belongs there too.

The idea here is that the individual human person is a unique, irreplaceable being with inalienable natural rights as an ineluctable consequence of his very existence. This status will sometimes be violated by force, but it does not change the status itself. Any such violation is entirely morally impermissible.

This is the sense in which I mean “sacred.” I was not trying to imply a religious test or requirement for the distributed nation. As I noted in the first part of the introduction (emphasis added)…

The what is a distributed nation: a worldwide polity of people united by a set of ideals…

Not a complex belief system that alienates as many as it attracts.
Not a set of edicts handed down by a central authority.
Not a culture focused on some ‘great leader.’

Just a small number of simple, fundamental, non-negotiable moral precepts, emanating from natural law, that are already shared and understood by most people.

These essential principles of natural law are the only sine qua non. Beyond that, people are, and ought to be, free to believe whatever they wish.

King/queen

The concern here is that kings and queens are exactly what we do not want.

First, hereditary authority is something we, as a species, were very much right to dispense with, as we gradually did during the period between the English civil wars and the end of World War I.

Second, there should not be any sort of involuntary authority whatsoever. And a reference to a monarch certainly implies that.

Neither implication was my intent. I was simply looking for a metaphor to express the same general notion as the word “sacred” was intended to express: absolute individual sovereignty.

The king of history had sovereignty over others. I was just using the monarch metaphor to describe the absolute inviolable sovereignty that the individual human person has, and must be free to enjoy, over himself and his property.

You are king of your castle. You are queen of yourself. You are sovereign within the space you occupy.

That’s all I meant.

I am writing these on the fly, and thus do not have time to edit and think through every metaphor 50 times before publication. Please try to be patient with me. I do appreciate the critiques, though—they will help bring clarity and make this better!

Wherever you are, you own yourself. Wherever you are, you are king (or queen).